Medscape Medical News 2004

June 9, 2004 (Orlando) — Tight glucose control can have significant benefits in the long term, suggest results of a new study that has continued to follow the participants in the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial (DCCT). Eight years after the DCCT ended, patients in the original tight glucose control group had significantly lower levels of diabetic neuropathy, retinopathy, and nephropathy than patients in the original conventional therapy group. The benefits for early intensive therapy persisted even though patients in the former conventional treatment group were given a crash-course in intensive diabetes management at the end of the DCCT. Patients in the intensive treatment group saw later benefits from their early efforts despite the fact that their A1c levels, which were significantly lower than those of control patients at the end of DCCT, had converged with those of the conventional therapy group eight years later.

Results of the follow-up trial, called the Epidemiology of Diabetes Interventions and Complications (EDIC) study, were presented at an oral abstracts session here at the 64th annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association by coinvestigator Catherine L. Martin, MS, APRN, clinical care coordinator at the Michigan Diabetes Research and Training Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "We don't yet know how long this trend is going to last. I think we were all stunned when we started seeing these trends that the HbA1c [levels] are predictive early in the game," Ms. Martin said in an interview with Medscape.

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